​US prisons hold 10 times more mentally ill people than state hospitals – report

More than 356,000 people with mental illnesses are incarcerated in the United States, as opposed to around 35,000 receiving treatment in state hospitals, a new study found, highlighting the dire state of the nation’s mental health care system.

The lead author of the report, conducted by the Treatment Advocacy
Center and the National Sheriffs’ Association, said the
ten-to-one ratio of patients in prison versus those receiving
qualified care is on par with the US mental health system of the
1830s.

“We’ve basically gone back to where we were 170 years
ago,” Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, founder of the Treatment
Advocacy Center, told Kaiser Health News. “We are doing an
abysmal job of treating people with serious mental illnesses in
this country. It is both inhumane and shocking the way we have
dumped them into the state prisons and the local jails.”

The report found 44 states and the District of Columbia have at
least one jail that holds more people coping with a mental
illness than the largest state psychiatric hospital in the US
does.

As states have drastically cut funding for mental health services
in the last several years, the number of available beds in
psychiatric hospitals has plunged to the lowest level since 1850.

Thus, many of these patients are shuffled into the prison system
simply because there is nowhere else for them to go. The US
prison population has steadily increased as mental health funding
has decreased, the National Alliance on Mental Illness has
found.

Prisoners with mental health issues are often put in solitary
confinement for long periods of time, stay incarcerated longer
than other prisoners, and are disproportionately abused, beaten,
and raped by other inmates, the new report noted. Without
treatment, the condition of ill inmates often worsens.

Since 1970, the percentage of prisoners with mental illnesses in
each state has risen an average of about 5 to 20 percent, the
report found.

“There is not a single state in the United States where you
want to go to a jail or prison and be severely mentally
ill,” said Torrey.

State laws often hamper care that a facility can offer a
prisoner.

“Jail officials can thus be legally sued in many states if
they forcibly medicate mentally ill prisoners without their
consent, yet can also be held legally responsible for the
consequences of such prisoners’ psychotic behavior,”
including suicide, the report said.

Though, ultimately, prisons and jails are not equipped to handle
those that need mental health treatment, especially those that
are persistent in refusing the reduced care that an incarceration
facility can offer, the report found.

“We have placed more than 300,000 severely mentally ill
individuals in prisons and jails that are neither equipped nor
staffed to handle such problems,” the report stated. “We
subsequently have made it very difficult to treat the mentally
ill inmates, put restriction on other options for controlling
their behavior, and then blamed the prison and jail
administrators when they fail. It is a situation that is grossly
unfair to both the inmates and the corrections officials and
should be the subject of public outrage and official
action.”

Another recent study found that housing mental health patients in
jails is not cheaper than funding hospitals, as many states have
insisted. Giving adequate psychiatric mental health care saves
money over time and keeps patients out of jail, according to researchers from North Carolina
State University and the University of South Florida.

ThinkProgress noted that many states have refused to expand
Medicaid coverage offered through the federal Affordable Care
Act, thus preventing around 1.2 million Americans from receiving
mental health care, according to the National Alliance on Mental
Health.